MINNEAPOLIS — The most persuasive case for a John McCain presidency was not made by the string of old white men in the Xcel Energy Center who'd reduced the candidate's résumé to a single bullet point: Plucky POW. Rather, it was made over coffee in a small function room in the Minneapolis Hyatt Regency.

"At a time when people desperately need government to work...John is absolutely essential," insists Olympia Snowe, the senior senator from Maine. "He can bridge the political divide, the political partisanship."

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"There's a reason John is who he is," she continues. "He's built those relationships across the divide because that's what he likes to do. He likes to shake the establishment."

Since first being elected to the House in 1979, Snowe, 61, has been a player at every GOP convention — that is, until this one. When the Republicans are professing a new effort to reach out to women and independents, one expects the party would showcase Snowe — after all, there are only three states in America that have two women senators, and only one where both women senators are Republicans. And Snowe has been a friend of McCain's for years — they've collaborated on across-the-aisle initiatives including drug reimportation legislation, the McCain-Feingold bill, and the Patient Bill of Rights. They are both members of the infamous Gang of 14, the bipartisan group of lawmakers formed to create compromise over the filibustering of judicial nominees. So what's keeping Olympia Snowe out of the spotlight?

"Well...choice," she explains.

Choice is not an issue John McCain has chosen to confront. In its first hurricane-streamlined day, the convention adopted a platform plank supporting "a human life amendment to the Constitution" and endorsing "legislation to make clear that the Fourteenth Amendment's protections apply to unborn children." It's not a plank the nominee has chosen to walk before. Back in 2000, McCain vigorously argued that a similar plank be amended to permit abortion in cases of rape, incest, and when the life of the mother is threatened. As late as this spring, McCain affirmed his position in an interview with Glamour magazine. Asked if he would encourage the party to include those exceptions in the platform, he said, "Yes," adding: "And by the way, I think that's the view of most people, that rape, incest, the life of the mother are issues that have to be considered." But in St. Paul, McCain turned suddenly dumb, saying only he "had not gotten into platform issues."

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Early last winter, when the wheels appeared to have come off the Straight Talk Express, Snowe comforted McCain. The chartered plane might be gone, the campaign staff laid off, Snowe said, but "Don't let that bother you...Now you're relieved of that big organization that's weighing you down, you're not shackled." The McCain campaign rebounded magnificently, only to find itself placed — perhaps all too willingly — in another set of restraints.

The plank, and efforts to amend it, is nothing new. In 1980, the same convention that nominated Ronald Reagan adopted a plank calling for a Constitutional amendment to ban all abortion. That plank, in one form or another, persists to this day. And convention after convention, Olympia Snowe has worked to remove or amend the plank. Snowe — named one of the nation's top 10 senators by Time, the 54th most influential woman in the world by Forbes magazine — finds the campaign oddly in no need of her services. No speaker's slot in the Xcel Energy Center, no round of delegation breakfasts as a candidate surrogate. A page on the official GOP convention Website says "OLYMPIA SNOWE AT THE CONVENTION: no events scheduled."

Still, Snowe has kept herself on standby for her friend and colleague. "I share his independence, the maverick nature," Snowe explains, although by the numbers Snowe is far more the maverick than McCain, who according to Congressional Quarterly, votes the party line more than 80% of the time. "I'm certainly prepared to do whatever's asked of me."

The Republican party, "which had been the party of women," has become estranged from its roots, worries Snowe, identified strongly with those who are antichoice, anti-equal rights. Nearly forgotten is the fact that back in 1923 it was two Republican legislators from Kansas who introduced the Equal Rights Amendment in Congress. (Though the ERA was introduced in every session of Congress between 1923 and 1970, it almost never reached the floor of either the Senate or the House for a vote — instead, it was usually "bottled up" in committee). The platform of the 1940 Republican Convention called for an equal rights amendment for women to be added to the Constitution. Republican platform support for the Equal Rights Amendment remained through the 1976 convention. It was the 1980 convention, the convention of the antiabortion plank, the convention that nominated Ronald Reagan, which turned its back on the amendment.

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But today Snowe admits to looking back on the Reagan era with nostalgia. As a new representative, Snowe spearheaded an effort to meet with the president to talk about women's issues, "to close the gender gap which at that time was affecting the Republican Party." Reagan met with the women in the Cabinet Room, a little bemused she says, but still open to learning about gender issues. The meeting led ultimately to "passing the landmark child support enforcement legislation, that heretofore had not been part of the Federal lexicon, much less part of Federal policy."

"In today's political world," the senator continues, careful not to mention any names, "I can't imagine a president hosting a meeting about the gender gap."

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Closing another gender gap was not quite as hard to imagine.

"Last week I was telling my husband," former Maine Gov. John "Jock" McKernan, Jr.,"I have a hunch John is going to select a woman," Snow said. "It felt like he was going to need a woman, so it's history-making.

Whether Sarah Palin is vice presidential material remains to be seen, Snowe says. "The best way to earn and engender respect is to be prepared," she notes. "Know your issues and be prepared. They have to make her accessible frankly, because the more accessible she is, the more comfortable America will be with her. They have to like you, and trust you."

Whether Palin is vice presidential nominee material is another matter altogether, Snowe says, and here the governor of Alaska clearly has the right stuff. The choice is "so consistent with John. I think compatibility on the ticket is so important."

There is one person Sarah Palin has to thank for a smooth transition on to the ticket, Snowe says. Unlike when Walter Mondale picked Geraldine Ferraro as his running mate just over three months before Election Day in 1988, Hillary Clinton was "out there every day for two years" giving people plenty of time to get used to the idea of a woman on a major party ticket, Snowe says. By the time McCain made his surprise running-mate selection, Americans "had an intimacy with a woman running for president." As a result, when McCain named Palin, there was no shock, "no wondering if a woman can do it."

"I think Hillary broke an enormous barrier and I told her [Clinton] that. She did an awesome job," said Snowe. "That door has been opened and will never close."

Snowe has a personal hero in another woman, a 1964 candidate for the Republican presidential nomination. Margaret Chase Smith was the first woman elected to the U.S. Senate from Maine, and the first woman of either party to have her name placed in nomination for president.

"I met Margaret Chase Smith when I was a senior in college in 1970, when I attended my first Republican state convention," Snowe says. The senator addressed the delegates, and "It's one of those things you always remember. She said 'I tell it like it is,' and the crowd just roared."

Freshman Sen. Chase Smith had the "guts and gumption" to be the first senator to denounce the tactics of Senate demagogue Joe McCarthy, As the red-hunting senator from Wisconsin looked on, Chase Smith took the floor on June 1, 1950, and issued her "Declaration of Conscience." Chase Smith spoke out about a "feeling of fear and frustration that could result in National suicide and the end of everything we Americans hold dear."

Chase Smith warned her colleagues, "Today our country is being psychologically divided by the confusion and the suspicions that are bred in the United States Senate to spread like cancerous tentacles of "know nothing, suspect everything" attitudes.... History is repeating itself — and the Republican Party again has the opportunity to emerge as the champion of unity and prudence." But, she cautioned, the opportunity was not without its own temptations.

To "displace it with a Republican regime embracing a philosophy that lacks political integrity or intellectual honesty would prove equally disastrous to this Nation. The Nation sorely needs a Republican victory. But I don't want to see the Republican Party ride to political victory on the four horsemen of calumny — fear, ignorance, bigotry and smear."

Nearly 60 years later, Chase Smith's words still have power. Powerful words that ought to play well with a man who bills himself as a straight-talking maverick. Words certainly more powerful than the postcards from Hanoi sent by Fred and Joe and Rudy, postcards sent while Olympia Snowe drank her coffee in a function room in the Hyatt Regency. But that's what happens, as Margaret Chase Smith might have said, when you send a man — or two, or three — to do a woman's job.